Want to know what’s driving the industry’s future creatives? AUT’s End of Year Portfolio Show will feature the school’s 10 Commandments alongside the work of industry hopefuls.
Apple has long been considered a design genius, associated with powerful yet simple product and packaging design, innovation, and of course for drawing ridiculously long queues after every new iPhone launch. As part of Idealog’s AUT Alumni Profiles, Jonathan Cotton caught up with one of the people responsible, Apple creative director Andrew McKechnie, to talk about his past at Y&R and DDB in New York, to ending up in charge of a 60-strong team.
AUT’s Colab and Spark Ventures have joined forces to solve real life problems with the innovative solutions of creative minds.
AUT students Tara Collins and Ruby Soole are set to make their debut in the marketing world after their idea won over Hansells and iSite Media.
The ideas have been dreamed up, the work has been displayed, the sucking up to creative leaders has been done, the leftover nibbles have presumably been wrapped up in napkins and taken home, and another bunch of advertising students have learned a few tricks to help them into gainful employment. Here are some of the highlights from AUT and Media Design School.
We are living in a millennial world. And Contagion’s Dean Taylor says their collective power is changing the way we do business. Here’s why.
In 2012, Dave Schiff started ad agency Made in a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado with two friends. They had no money, no clients and no idea how to run a business. Just three years later Made has more than 40 employees with a client list including a host of internationally recognised brands. And this week, Schiff is in Auckland to speak at Project15 on modern disruption and cause-based advertising.
The earnestness, thousand yard stares and various cliches seen in fashion ads are a fairly easy target, as seen in anything from Zoolander to Mercedes-Benz’ tongue in cheek Fistful of Wolves. But, given the importance placed on aesthetics in this industry, they generally look good and that’s certainly the case with a film shot by Vince McMillan, a director’s assistant at Exit Films, for AUT University’s fashion department.
As Whitney so rightly sang, the children are our future. And the ad children from two of the bigger schools are getting set show off the year’s work in the hope of securing gainful employment, with AUT holding a function tonight and Media Design School holding its portfolio event next Tuesday (and using the ‘reaction faces’ of local creative juggernauts to help promote it).
After 14 years, Vivien Bridgwater has called it day on her career as the general manager of university relations at AUT University. So what has she acheived in that time, why is she leaving and what is she doing next?
Changes at AUT, Yahoo!, APN, MediaWorks Radio, Food magazine, The Sweet Shop, NBR and Mazda.
Increasingly, the worlds of art and technology—and commerce and technology—are colliding. Digital Art Live, a collaboration between CoLab and The Edge, is bringing that fusion into the real world and its upcoming exhibition Cut and Paste features a collaboration between digital artist Jenna Gavin and the Auckland Writers Festival.
An AUT researcher and developers who graduated from the university have created an app to find out if you’re at risk of having a stroke or developing other major health problems.
As part of The Project 2013, which was delivered by AUT, the US Embassy Wellington and Social Media NZ, media/tech expert Dr Jeffrey Cole spoke to an audience of around 200 people about the death of laptops, how Amazon might soon rule the world and why online communities are like nightclubs.
AUT Adschool students are getting ready to present their portfolios to prospective employers at the annual end-of-year show, which will be held on 19 November from 5.30 to 8.30pm.
Made Movement is a new US agency that claims to have redefined the ad agency model, is run by ex-Crispin Porter + Bogusky brains Dave Schiff, John Kieselhorst, Scott Prindle and, more recently, Alex Bogusky and focuses solely on promoting American-made products. So can such a model exist in New Zealand? Are we seeing a similar consumer shift to locally made, craft focused and sustainably driven products? And how is this affecting where global brands are going? AUT is giving Kiwi marcomms folk a chance to hear Made’s creative chief Dave Schiff answer those questions with a free live-streamed event on Friday 18 October.
If you managed to avoid Twitter over the weekend, you may not have realised that hyper-intellectual event Tedx was held in Auckland on Saturday.
The Waterfront Theatre Project, which is a partnership between the university and the Auckland Theatre Company (ATC), will see the construction of the new performance centre in the trendy Wynyard Quarter area – specifically amongst the Innovation Precinct to be built in the area.
AUT’s Paul White has been challenging assumptions around outdoor advertising.
Job losses and a high-profile departure at APN, Tim Wood heads to Rapp Tribal, Paul Hancox heads to TV, Jordan Dale snaps up bcg2 scholarship and Pead PR bolsters its tech team.
It’s that time of year again, when fresh faced young’uns with dreams of creative greatness prostrate themselves in front of adland’s judgemental powerbrokers and show off the year’s handiwork. So get thee to the end of year show for the AUT Ad Creativity course on Friday 9 November at the Film Construction building in Minnie St if you want to see it.
Another bumper edition of TVCs of the Week, with Tourism New Zealand, Unitec, AUT, Lotto, Telecom and Pak ‘n’ Save making it on to the (extended) dais.
The digital age is changing the way we live and work. And whatever your industry or interest, you’re part of the wave, like it or not. And digital media conference The Project, described as “a collision of thought on social media and digital communication”, is your chance to figure out how to ride it.
Jessica Knox is added to the MediaWorks Radio arsenal, Jason Jones takes over photographers’ agency Collective Force, Taxi Impact welcomes Felicity-Anne Flack as agency sales director, AUT students Devon Wood and Stacey Vergis take creative title, the PR Shop announces a new import, Ecoya finds some extra moolah and Getty shacks up with Lonely Planet.
Since it was formed in 2003 and was quickly noticed for its stellar work on 42 Below, Consortium has been an ad agency happy to fly under the radar and steer clear of the media. But after finding some renewed vigour for the ad business and deciding to refocus his energies on the agency he founded, Paul Shale has decided to pin his more strategic colours to the mast by announcing a few changes, including the addition of former director of home at Telecom and director of Yahoo!Xtra Ralph Brayham as a 50 percent shareholder and director.
David Thomason and Lew Bentley take on Effie responsibilities, DDB Worldwide shifts its creative nerve centre to Shanghai, Mick Connolly joins Waitemata Films, Senate Communications nabs two senior bods, Miles Gandy kicks off his new biz with New Zealand Geographic, Datamine adds two to the flock and AUT trumpets another win for its students.
With the huge—some might say completely OTT—number of courses available in New Zealand, education is a very competitive sector. And, as is usually the case over summer, a range of academic institutions are currently ramping up their marketing activity in an effort to get more students to sign up. The last phase of Unitec’s year-long docu-ad series went live recently, AUT is pushing its interesting new campaign, and many smaller, more specialised schools are also advertising. But two new ads caught our attention this week: one featuring the inspiring ‘and not but’ message for the Open Polytechnic, which was created by Ogilvy Wellington and follows up from the very successful ‘Open World’ campaign, and the other a nice animated spot for the Manukau Institute of Technology, which was created by BCG2 and Cirkus.
It’s that time of year again, where the pros of today get to come and have a gander at some of the things the pros of tomorrow have been up to over the year. So if you want first dibs on some of the fresh talent or you just want to see how the yoof are being shaped and moulded, then head along to 1885 at Britomart on Tuesday November 8 for a look at AUT’s Ad Creativity class of 2011. Industry folk are invited to attend from 5:30pm and friends and whanau will turn up at 7pm.
Photo by Paul Statham
AUT became a university just ten years ago and while its compelling consumer-facing brand was doing the business, its 14 Research Institutes had grown organically until 2009 and had no overall marketing, brand or strategic direction—even though research success plays a big role in establishing a good reputation. Enter 30-year-old Max Woodhead, who worked in marketing for sport and recreation and applied sciences and whose job it was to help build a research brand from scratch, unify the view of these disparate research strands, get the notoriously headstrong academics and institute directors to believe in the project and eventually build AUT’s overall brand, attract better post graduate academics, foster better research outputs and bring in more funding.
The News International phone hacking saga put the cosy network of media and government in sharp focus and showed how powerful media organisations can extert undue pressure on lawmakers and law upholders. And, according to a report by AUT University’s Research Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy (JMAD), similar trends—and their associated dangers—are also evident in New Zealand.